One blackberry at a time

My friend invited me to come over to his house to share in his surplus of blackberries. Being a friend, I could hardly refuse, but it was something of a nuisance, ducking underneath the netting draped over the canes to keep the birds out, scrambling around on hands and knees, reaching awkwardly up into the canes to get to the ripe ones almost out of my reach.

Blackberries just don’t ripen all at the same time, rather they ripen one at a time in their clusters from green to red to black, or more precisely, they eventually ripen to a very deep, dark, lustrous purple. At that point the berry will very nearly drop into your hand when you reach for it. But my point is that you have to pick each blackberry one at a time.

So you look for the ripe ones. Sometimes they’ll hide behind a leaf, sometimes they are just one more finger’s-length away from your outstretched fingers. But seek and you shall find. Blackberries!

Sometimes you’ll get lucky and collect two or three ripe ones in a handful before dropping them into the bowl. Eventually there will be enough in the bowl for a cobbler or crisp. And if you’re really ambitious, there’s jam. But I rarely want to work that hard. Thankfully, my friend has a relatively small patch of blackberries.

But as picking blackberries goes, it turns out that a blackberry will end up in your mouth – one blackberry at a time. And then another. And then you begin to realize that one blackberry is sweeter, juicier than another. They’re all good, mind you, but as you’re picking them, one blackberry is sweeter and juicer than another. And, oh, just how sweet and juicy that can be. Better than you imagined. And then the picking becomes a quest.

And yes, all of those blackberries that do make it to the bowl will be as good as they can be all jumbled together in a cobbler or crisp, but I recommend eating blackberries one at a time – handed to you like a gift. Juicy. Sweet.

You’ll taste the difference. You’ll taste the wonder.